Negation in African American Vernacular English

Howe, Darin

doi:10.1075/z.132.16how

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…(ii) Negative concord rarely applies to a and an (Labov 1972a: 806;Cheshire 1982: 66;Smith 2001: 131). While its occurrence (albeit rare) could be deemed evidence that these should be included in the variable context (Howe 2005), Labov (1972a: 810-811) argues that those exceptions arise because any is inserted prior to negative concord applying. (iii) No is overwhelmingly considered equivalent to not any (Quirk et al 1985: 782;Tieken-Boon van Ostade 1997: 188;Anderwald 2002;Peters 2008;Peters and Funk 2009;Wallage 2015Wallage : 214, 2017.…”

Section: The Variable Context and Data Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

Childs

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper integrates syntactic theory and variationist analysis in an investigation of the variation between English not-negation (I don't have any money), no-negation (I have no money) and negative concord (I don't have no money). Using corpora of three varieties of UK English spoken in Glasgow, Tyneside and Salford respectively, I test two theoretical accounts of the variation. Account 1 applies Zeijlstra's (2004) agreement-based theory of negative concord to all three variants, such that n-words (e.g. nobody) which feature in no-negation and negative concord are not inherently negative but agree with a negative operator in a higher NegP. Under Account 2, no-negation is instead derived via negative-marking within the DP followed by movement to the higher NegP for sentential scope (Kayne 1998; Svenonius 2002; Zeijlstra 2011). These accounts, together with observations about the raising properties of functional versus lexical verbs, lead to the formulation of different hypotheses about the distribution of variants in speech according to verb type, verb phrase complexity, and the discourse status of the propositions expressed. Results of distributional analysis and mixed-effects modelling support Account 2 of the variation over Account 1, suggesting structural identity between not-negation and negative concord (in contrast to no-negation). This supports Tubau's (2016) proposal that English negative indefinites have two distinct structures: one in which negation is marked syntactically in the DP and one in which they agree with a syntactically-higher NegP.

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Section: The Variable Context and Data Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

Childs

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…We also see a very slight hint of strongly negative interpretations (e.g., very unhappy) from the flagrant double negatives of Expt. 3 (not not happy): The additivity of negations, or negative concord, is not often associated with standard English, though it is relatively common cross-linguistically (e.g., in Italian: non capisco niente, literal translation: I don't understand nothing; Zeijlstra, 2004) including in African American Vernacular English (e.g., Mohammad Ali: "Ain't never been another fighter like me"; Labov, 1972;Howe, 2005). Finally, though we did not find any evidence of double negatives being interpreted as strong positives in the minimal contexts used in our experiments, double negatives are employed in understatement (Bolinger, 1972): In the appropriate context, "I was not unaware of the problem" could mean I was damn well aware of the problem.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not unreasonable: Why two negatives don't make a positive

Tessler¹,

Franke²

2019

Preprint

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Logic tells us that two negatives make a positive, but in language, things are not so black and white: A person "not unhappy" may not be entirely happy. We hypothesize that innovative uses of double negatives like "not unhappy" stem from listeners entertaining flexible meanings for negation markers like "not" and "un-", which context can then help disambiguate. We formalize this hypothesis in a computational model of language understanding, which predicts that "not unhappy" means something different from "happy" but also makes the additional prediction that single negations ("unhappy" vs. "not happy") are interpreted identically except when a speaker uses both in the same context, which we confirm experimentally. Even double negations that flagrantly use the same negation marker twice (e.g., "not not happy") are interpreted in subtle ways. These findings suggest that even one of the most logical elements of language—negation—can mean many things at once.

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“…Secondly, several investigations of negative concord in different varieties of English find that a and an either do not undergo negative concord at all, or do so very rarely (Labov 1972a: 806;Cheshire 1982: 66;Smith 2001: 131). Although Howe (2005) finds examples of this kind in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Labov (1972a: 810-11) had argued (also based on AAVE) that such instances arise because any is inserted prior to negative concord taking place. This can explain why (12b) and (12c) are equivalent in emphatic force while (12a) is much weaker.…”

Section: Corpora and Samplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transatlantic perspectives on variation in negative expressions

Childs

Harvey

Corrigan

et al. 2018

English Language and Linguistics

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Negation with indefinite items in English can be expressed in three ways: any-negation (I didn’t have any money), no-negation (I had no money) and negative concord (I didn’t have no money). These variants have persisted over time, with some studies suggesting that the newest variant, any-negation, is increasing at the expense of no-negation (Tottie 1991a, 1991b). Others suggest that although this variable was undergoing change in earlier centuries, it is stable in Modern English (Wallage 2017). This article examines the current state of the variability in four communities within two distinctive English-speaking regions: Toronto and Belleville in Ontario, Canada, and Tyneside and York in Northern England. Our comparative quantitative analysis of speech corpora from these communities shows that the rates of no-negation vary between Northern England and Ontario, but the variation is largely stable and primarily conditioned by verb type in a robust effect that holds cross-dialectally: functional verbs retain no-negation, while lexical verbs favour any. The social embedding of the variability varies between the communities, but they share a common variable grammar.

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Negation in African American Vernacular English

Cited by 14 publications

References 11 publications

Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

Integrating syntactic theory and variationist analysis: The structure of negative indefinites in regional dialects of British English

Not unreasonable: Why two negatives don't make a positive

Transatlantic perspectives on variation in negative expressions

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